M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Sharpening the Blade on The Cutting Edge
by D. Michael Martindale

I'm sure most of us, when we were young tykes, tried our parents shoes on. It was fun clomping around in them, but didn't it look silly to have our tiny feet trying to fill those huge shoes!

Jeffrey Savage's Cutting Edge is like that. It's not that tiny feet can't get the job done. They can pitter-patter kids around with greater energy than most adults manage. It's just that they look pretty silly when they try to wear shoes that are too big for them.

Cutting Edge is billed as a high-tech thriller. This evokes images of sweeping global conspiracies and shadowy professional villains. Even the title makes a bold claim, suggesting sexy technology that pushes the boundaries of science fiction. If this is what you expect to read when you pick up Cutting Edge, you'll be disappointed. This ain't no Tom Clancy for Mormons.

But what is there somehow grabbed me, in spite of my desire to resist it. The story was slow in starting up with Savage making a classic new-author error: an opening scene showing main character Travis Edwards doing something mundane as he thinks about all the backstory the author wants the reader filled in on. Not the sort of action-packed opening one would expect from a thriller. In fact, the real hook of high-tech intrigue is so late in coming, that Savage resorts to an utterly superfluous prologue whose sole purpose seems to be assuring the reader that this really will be a thriller.

But when Travis and Lisa Edwards finally move from their safe extended-family cocoon in Utah to Silicon Valley for his new glamorous job, the story finally picks up, and we no longer have to rely on vague hints from a vague prologue to sustain our interest. Travis' first day at his new company, Open Door, is a fascinating portrait of one of those search-engine-turned-big-player Internet companies whose success has surpassed the business savvy of its management. Given Savage's own background in dot.com companies, the reader must assume that the portrait is accurate. Inflatable plastic furniture in the reception area, new age approaches to management, computer-guru eccentrics who would fall under suspicion of mental illness in any other environment.

Travis is schmoozed into moving to California, contrary to his wife's adamant desire to stay in Utah. But with the obligatory praying and feeling good about the move, Lisa reluctantly agrees, and off they go. At first, the move seems to be right after all. But before long, things go horribly awry, as they must in a high tech thriller.

Travis starts noticing strange things going on in the office. He begins to suspect that the software files he's working on are being stolen, but by the very person he turns them over to for testing. It makes no sense to him at all--why would the person he's going to hand them to in the next day or so bother to steal them?

The astute movie buff might notice some influences in Savage's work from films they'd viewed in the past. The disappearing-reappearing oddball seems lifted right out of Real Genius. The game of guess-which-suspect-is-really-the-FBI-agent reminds one of Whoopi Goldberg's Jumping Jack Flash. And of course, the field is white already to harvest red herrings right and left, like every mystery story ever concocted.

Too often for my tastes, Travis is more blockheaded than a person of his intelligence ought to be. This seems to be a common trope in mysteries, but it's an irritating one. And the climactic action scene at the end forces the average-Joe hero to stretch himself to the limits just to save his life. Again, this is to be expected in an action story, but I got the sense that the scene dragged on a bit longer than was wise, with each minute he survives straining credulity just a little bit more.

But the story still grabbed me. I didn't like the prologue; I didn't like the slow beginning; I eyed the characterization with a bit of suspicion; I thought the hints and red herrings could have been painted with a more subtle brush; I wanted to read with a red pencil to correct the many punctuation errors. In spite of all this, I ended up with a page-turner in my hands. Savage wrote a story exciting enough to keep me going, to make me want to see what happens next in spite of the fact that it was well past my bedtime.

The Mormonness of the main characters mostly works. Mercifully we are spared any heavy-handed inspirational message when all we want is some fun reading, but the Edwards' religion comes into play in ways that are authentic. We even get a home teacher who becomes a suspect--how fun! The paranoia that Travis begins to feel, even about the members of his own ward, is a fresh twist in the world of LDS fiction, and provides a uniquely Mormon mood of creepiness.

But we never get to sweep the globe. Our villains are just local turkeys stumbling through their conspiracy. The "cutting edge" technology of the book is nothing more impressive than a supercharged Internet search engine. The antagonist motives are mundane: trying to make the big bucks in a viciously competitive industry as several companies vie to go public first so their stock can be the one that skyrockets.

Nonetheless, Savage does get enough things right. He foreshadows well. His characters' backstories don't always amount to much, but the episodes and oddities that happen in the present are put to good use to further the plot and justify turns of events. The "cutting edge" technology is integral to the resolution of the main conflict, as it should be in a techno-thriller. The mastermind villains are sufficiently disguised to make the mystery work.

And the smallness of the scope actually brings the book down into the realm of greater believability. We don't get Tom Clancy bigness, but the events that do occur one can actually imagine happening to a regular guy. Why, the CIA doesn't even recruit Travis to be spy-for-a-day!

Besides the usual small weaknesses one typically finds in an author's first published novel, Cutting Edge more than anything gets its edge dulled by overambitious hype. In their zeal to sell the book, Covenant seems to have handed Cutting Edge a pair of shoes that its smaller feet can't fill. Savage's first novel is, when all is said and done, an enjoyable read, if the reader counts on a small, intimate tale of intrigue, and doesn't expect to sweep the globe.

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